


The One Left Behind

by LtTanyaBoone



Category: Pan Am
Genre: Character Death, Future Fic, Gen, Racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:53:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LtTanyaBoone/pseuds/LtTanyaBoone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Kate says she will call back in an hour or two before hanging up. Laura stays up half of the night, but the phone never rings again."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The One Left Behind

**Disclaimers:** Pan Am, the rights to the show and its characters do not belong to me. No money was made by this.  
 **Spoilers:** everything, future AU (?)  
 **Pairings:** Laura/Joe

 **Warning:** character death, hints at racism

* * *

 

It’s August 17, 1968. It’s Henry’s first birthday and Laura can’t stop smiling, can’t stop grinning whenever she looks at her son. Joe’s submarine has returned from deployment and seeing him and their little boy together makes her so incredibly happy that she doesn’t even need to glare at anyone staring at them in the park.

They stay in New York instead of driving up to her parents’ house for a celebration. Mostly because Laura is worried about what might happen if they are caught by someone there. In New York, her and Joe were free to marry, to be a couple. She doesn’t want a repeat of their first day together, when he got beaten up at the train station. And that happened in the city, so Laura doesn’t even want to imagine what people might be up to outside of it.

Colette and Zoe stop by for a few hours, the little girl all smiles for a change. But Laura can see the underlying worry in her friend’s dark eyes, sees her smile falter when she run her hand over Zoe’s blonde hair. Dean is off fighting in a war, flying planes that carry bombs instead of people, and the fear never quite leaves Colette. A fear that Laura is all too familiar with, that the next phone call might be that one, that the next time she sees a man in uniform, it will be to have them hear that her husband has fallen, that he is not coming back to her except in a casket.

It’s almost Henry’s bedtime and Colette and Zoe have left hours ago when the phone rings. Joe answers it, because Laura is busy trying to feed their son his dinner, against the boy’s vehement protesting of his diet.

It’s Kate and she’s sorry that she couldn’t call earlier, that her job is keeping her away on this day. Joe assures her it’s fine, they understand. When he asks Laura if he should take over, the blonde woman shakes her head and Kate says she will call back in an hour or two before hanging up. Laura stays up half of the night, but the phone never rings again.

* * *

The last time she actually talked to her sister, face to face, was in June. They managed to make it to their parents’ house together, to celebrate their anniversary. Henry had a fever and Laura was busy worrying about him, fussing over him until Maria actually took the boy from her, telling her to relax. She caught Kate attempting to hide her grin behind a glass of wine and Laura gave her a mild glare, teasing her that Kate would know what that was like soon enough, worrying about your child. Her sister’s eyes had flickered from hers then and she had changed the topic.

In September, Laura can’t help but replay every single conversation she had with her sister in the course of two months, every phone call, every letter. Wonders if she missed something, wonders if she did something to piss Kate off. But even if she had, her sister would have never taken it out on her nephew, on Henry. But there is no present from the redhead, no card, and the longer the silence continues the more Laura worries.

* * *

Kate was many things, but she was never unreliable. At least Laura thinks so. For all the disappearing acts her sister pulled in the two years they both worked at Pan Am, before Kate took the secretary position with an international company and Laura married Joe, Laura knew that if she needed her, Kate would be there.

Kate was the one who told her to let them talk when Joe visited them at the Pan Am hub one day and they kissed, momentarily forgetting about the audience they had. Laura hadn’t known that friendships could be destroyed within a second, just because of the skin color of the man she had fallen in love with.

Kate fought for Joe and her when they were both too tired to. She was the one that arranged the wedding and took care of things, a stark contrast to the preparations of her intended wedding to Greg. It’s the redhead who manages to make their mother and father shut up for the ceremony and actually sit next to Joe’s mother.

Kate was the one who Laura went to when she found out she was pregnant and Joe was at sea, with no means to reach him. The genuine happiness her sister showed in that moment was what gave her the courage to do this. And Kate loves her nephew, Laura never had a reason to doubt that, from the very first second on that the redhead held the little boy, smiling at him in awe, tears pricking in her green eyes.

But now Kate has disappeared. It’s as if the world has just opened up and swallowed her whole, like she vanished, from one second to the next. And Laura is the one left behind, wondering what on earth might have happened to her sister.

* * *

If there’s a trait Laura and Kate share, it’s their stubbornness. Laura can’t take a _no_ any more than Kate could, and unanswered questions tend to bug her until she finally manages to find the answer.

There’s a strange phone call in the middle of the night in December, and Laura goes through the routine of informing the police about it before she packs up her things and goes to stay at her parents’ for a week. There have been enough threats against her and Joe and Henry that she is familiar with the procedure.

Kate’s room is exactly as she left it the last time she was in the house. Or rather, how Maria left it after Kate had left and the maid had cleaned up after her. Laura lies down on her sister’s bed and turns her head into the pillow. It still smells like her, of her shampoo and the soft hint of Kate’s favorite perfume. If she closes her eyes, she can pretend that Kate’s lying next to her, can almost feel her watching. But when she sits up again, it’s Judith who stands in the doorway of Kate’s room, her arms crossed.

“Something happened to her, didn’t it?” the woman whispers. It’s the first time in years that Laura sees her mother cry.

* * *

The Italian police doesn’t help. They are stonewalling where they can, it seems. It breaks her heart, but in the end, Laura leaves Henry with his paternal grandmother and goes to Italy herself.

The hotel Kate supposedly stayed in doesn’t have any record of her ever being there. It’s only when Laura returns the next day and shows them a picture that one of the concierges remembers her sister. But he claims that she said her name was Vitoria and he remembers because she spoke Italian but he detected an accent.

They give her the key to Kate’s hotel room and Laura spends two hours just standing there, leaning against the table while she wonders what on earth has happened to her sister. Wonders what went on in Kate’s head, before she went completely Houdini. What could have made her sister run away like this, could have caused her to vanish without the slightest clue as to why or where she was.

When Laura’s eyes fall on the telephone in the room, she suddenly remembers that Kate called her and asks for the phone records. Strangely enough, Kate made two calls, but they were to local numbers in Rome.

With those, she goes back to the police, demanding to know who the numbers belong to. One is a fancy restaurant. The other belongs to a man selling antique books in a little shop. They tell her to let it go, that they already checked everything. But Laura can’t help but distrust them, after they failed to inform her that Kate never used her real name at the hotel, that someone paid for the room after her sister vanished so the hotel didn’t have a reason to file a police report.

* * *

She’s been in Rome for six days, not getting anywhere. The restaurant doesn’t remember ever seeing someone like Kate, but they fired two of their waiters and are unwilling to hand out their addresses so that Laura might be able to check with them.

She calls Joe’s mother and spends minutes listening to Henry babble nonsense into the phone, clamming her hand tightly over her mouth so her son doesn’t hear her cry. She misses him, misses him terribly. Between that and being unable to find her sister, to figure out what might have happened to her, Laura thinks her heart might get ripped in two.

It was Kate who coaxed the first laugh from Henry. Not just a toothless grin, but she actually made him laugh. It was one of those days when nothing seemed to go right and Laura called her because she needed a break, needed an adult with a sense of direction to tell her that she wasn’t doing so bad as a mother. For some reason, Laura always believed her sister when she said it. And Kate had been holding Henry and telling one of those ridiculous college experience stories, talking to the boy half the time, her voice pitched higher than usual. And when she had smiled at Henry, he had smiled back and then Kate had laughed, tickling the baby’s stomach lightly and Henry had laughed along with her. And it’s a picture Laura will never be able to forget, her son and his aunt grinning at each other, their eyes sparkling.

So many of her memories of Henry’s early weeks and months are tightly interwoven with Kate’s presence and Laura wonders how she never managed to realize that, when Joe couldn’t be there for most of the pregnancy and the birth and his son’s first months, Kate always was and dropped everything when Laura called her.

* * *

Laura is staring at the statue Graham told her to find all those years ago, her mind wandered off when someone suddenly blocks her sun. She turns her head and finds herself looking at a man she could have sworn she saw before, although she doesn’t remember his name.

He introduces himself as Richard Parks to her, holding out his hand. Laura merely looks at it, refusing to take it. Experience has taught her that if someone suddenly shows up and knows your name when you can’t place them or remember them at all, it’s usually not a good thing.

She’s about to politely tell the man to get lost when he lowers his voice and says those magic words.

“I know what happened to your sister.”

* * *

Back at home, the first thing Laura does is hug her son tightly to herself and cry. Henry is confused and starts squirming and fighting her hold, but she just kisses his temple and continues to hold him.

She doesn’t tell her mother-in-law what she found out about Kate. Richard made her swear a hundred oaths and sign more papers than she could count that she wouldn’t share this story with anyone. She still intends to tell their parents, at least in part. She can’t tell them that Kate’s body is buried in a village two hours from Rome, a stranger’s name on her headstone.

She never thought that her sister, Kate who took pride in her liberal views, Kate with such a furious passion and temper, could have worked for the CIA. That her sister took an oath to protect this country and died defending it. That she was an undercover agent who got caught in the crossfire.

Kate meant to call. She was with Richard most of the day, getting run through the mission. When she called Laura, she used a secure line in the American embassy, in an attempt not to have anyone be able to trace her steps back to her family. Always concerned about keeping them save, of keeping Laura and Henry out of her messes.

It was supposed to be a routine pick-up. She would walk into the bookshop and ask for a book and the owner would tell her to come back a few hours later so he might find it in his collection. Only when Kate came back, she found that someone had broken into the shop. She tried finding the book she was supposed to pick up, but couldn’t. When she left, someone must have spotted her. She went back to her hotel and called the restaurant, where one of their undercover agents worked, telling him she felt like she was being followed. They instructed her to return to the embassy. Somewhere between her leaving the hotel and getting to the embassy, they caught up with her.

Richard said the owner of a warehouse found Kate two days later. She died while working under cover for the CIA, and her cover had to remain intact, even after her death. So she was buried in the village that was listed as her place of birth in her forged passport.

The story Richard suggests for their parents is this: That Kate met someone and was about to go out with them. Of Laura had answered the phone, she would have told her about it, but since it was Joe, her sister didn’t feel comfortable discussing that. That evening, Kate disappeared, but the police found her clothes and passport in the man’s apartment when they went to question him. He admitted to killing her sister but remained silent about where he had hid her body and the police couldn’t find it, so they have given up.

It’s a lie, a ghastly lie and not the death that Kate deserves. Kate deserves the truth and so do her mother and her father and everyone. But her sister wasn’t the only one involved in the assignment in Rome, she interacted with other agents, agents who would lose their cover if the real identity of Kate would be revealed. People who could lose their lives.

So Laura swallows and tells her parents the biggest lie of her life.

* * *

She's always had a big sister. For the longest of time, Laura can’t figure out how she is supposed to live her life without Kate in it. It’s a ridiculous thought, but she never for a second thought that it would become her reality. Even when she was mad at her, Laura never wanted her sister to disappear, to vanish from her life.

The headstone is a simple one. Black marble, with Kate’s name and her date of birth carved into it. For the day that marks the end of her life, they went with one day after Henry’s birthday. Perhaps because it was past midnight when in Italy when Kate called them. Or perhaps no one wants to taint the boy’s birthday for the rest of his life by having it be the day that his aunt died. An aunt that loved him so much but one he will still not be able to remember, ever.

Laura carefully picks the baby out of the pram, adjusting the hat on the little girl’s head.

She found out about the pregnancy on what would have been Kate’s 32nd birthday. It’s the first time since her little girl’s birth that Laura has been to her sister’s grave – her memorial stone, really, because her actual grave is in Italy. Laura spent three hours crying there when Richard took her to see it after he told her about her sister’s real purpose in Italy all those months ago.

She still misses her. Sometimes she catches herself picking up the phone to call, to just talk. She’s always halfway through dialing her number when she remembers that Kate is dead, that her sister no longer walks this earth and there is no way to reach her. Remembers cleaning out her apartment and saying goodbye with every piece she touched.

The infant yawns and turns her head, blinking her dark eyes up at her mother. “I wish you could have met her.” Laura mutters, unsure who she is talking to, her daughter or her sister. It still hurts, to think that she will never see her sister again, never hear her laugh ring out, never hear her tell her that everything will be okay.

Perhaps naming her daughter after a person she will never meet was a mistake. But Laura wants to remember her sister, and she wants her to grow up to be a strong woman, just like her aunt.

 The sun comes out behind the clouds and little Katherine scrunches up her face before she yawns again and closes her eyes, relaxing into sleep, and Laura can’t help but hope that somewhere, Kate sees and smiles.

 _fin._


End file.
